Friday Links 0.0.14 - ngrok

ngrok

Have you ever wanted to let someone connect to a development version of
your webapp and test something out? It’s a pain to configure IIS Express
to allow external configurations, and to use real IIS you’d have to set
up a deployment, configure a host binding, probably stop using SQL Server
LocalDB and switch to SQL Express, and if the person wasn’t on the local
network you’d be out of luck anyway.

Ngrok solves this problem by creating a public domain that tunnels into
your local server.

For windows you just have to unzip a package and open a command line
prompt inside that extracted folder. Run ngrok.exe to see the help
message:

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c:\apps>ngrok

NAME:

ngrok - tunnel local ports to public URLs and inspect traffic

DESCRIPTION:

ngrok exposes local networked services behinds NATs and firewalls to the

public internet over a secure tunnel. Share local websites, build/test

webhook consumers and self-host personal services.

Detailed help for each command is available with 'ngrok help <command>'.

Open http://localhost:4040 for ngrok's web interface to inspect traffic.

EXAMPLES:

ngrok http 80 # secure public URL for port 80 web server

ngrok http -subdomain=baz 8080 # port 8080 available at baz.ngrok.io

ngrok http foo.dev:80 # tunnel to host:port instead of localhost

ngrok tcp 22 # tunnel arbitrary TCP traffic to port 22

ngrok tls -hostname=foo.com 443 # TLS traffic for foo.com to port 443

ngrok start foo bar baz # start tunnels from the configuration file

So if you wanted to debug a site in IIS Express running on port 55204, you
would run ngrok http 55204: